Following are selected articles and commentaries that have been shared
with me via email since the attack occurred. If you have any comments
or something to add, please email
Paula.

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9/18/01

Myriam Touimer

The following is an observation by Tamim Ansary, an Afghani-American
writer

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back
to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed
that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing
to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral
damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later, I heard some TV pundit
discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because
I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years
I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell
anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There
is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the
atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about
those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan.
They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are
a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997.
Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban,
think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you
think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration
camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with
this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators.
They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban
and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their
country. Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the
Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated,
suffering.

A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000
disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food.
There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these
widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines,
the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of
the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone
Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their
houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate
their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off
from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all
that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would
they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan,
only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd
slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled
orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs.
But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike
against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would
only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again
the people they've been raping all this time.

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak
with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to
go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the
belly to do what needs to be done," they're thinking in terms of
having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to
overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull
our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans
dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their
way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger
than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd
have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The
conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations
just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world
war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that's Bin Laden's
program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read
his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes
Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures
if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a
billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands,
that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better
from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end
the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would
last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?